Thursday, December 12, 2013

Charles Bernstein / Two Poems

The fear and the hum are one.Monuments of show gumming the worksUntil the weather grows tired of the peopleAnd the people grow tired of the dance.Jamais, jamais, jamais, again.

The measure of the town against a dampening skyCobbling together six million tunesInto more than the tones tattooOr their scrambled mosaic forecloses.

And if the fume and the hopeAre one? My monkey, from ’49Steps as silent as those songsAlong the cratered darkWhere Jews do Jewish thingsNo one pretends to understandOr are they pilgrims on this nightWhen the fear and the hum are one?

WON’T YOU GIVE UP THIS POEMTO SOMEONE WHO NEEDS IT?

Remember what I told you about purgatory?Limbo? How all that’s happening now is justthis waiting around till the big cheese makes upher mind about you? She makes you the wayyou are and then decides if it panned out; forevery ten half-baked cookies there’s a gem&, you know, just maybe you’re one of those.Then there’s those take her name in vain—whaddya call them?, the religious moralists;she don’t much cotton to them, not whenthey try to take away a woman’s right to chooseor bad-mouth folks almost as queer as she is.Well, everyone makes mistakes. That’s whatpurgatory’s for. Sometimes it happens thatwhile you wait you see what’s what—startaccepting you’re in a long queue for Godonly knows what. And neither of you hasany idea what the hell the matter is or whatto do about it.